Google Apologizes for Gmail Outage

Published May 5, 2011 at 5:33 AM

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Google apologized for approximately 150,000 Gmail users losing their e-mail on Sunday when the search giant released a storage software update over the weekend. PCMag.com has the number of affected accounts at 0.02 percent of all users.

"The good news is that email was never lost and we’ve restored access for many of those affected," Ben Treynor, vice president of engineering, wrote on the Official Gmail Blog Monday night. "Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we're making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon."

According to Google's Apps Status Dashboard, the bug was first reported at 12:09 p.m. Sunday and was still being worked on Monday evening. Treynor said engineers worked 30 hours to find the deleted messages which had been backed up to offline tapes and protected from any software bugs. The e-mails would be restored in a matter of hours, however e-mail sent to affected users 5 p.,m. Sunday through 2 p.m. Monday was likely bounced back to senders. A full status report is available at the Apps Status Dashboard.

While there seems to be some eyerolling about Google blaming a software update for the problem, it's entirely possible that something just that routine can knock even a huge Internet company for a loop. It did seem as if Treynor was trying to downplay the outage by calling the thousands affected "0.02% of Gmail users," but if what Treynor says is correct -- there are no nuked archives or lost e-mail. It's all somewhere and will be making its way to the correct Gmail account soon.